I am currently in Killarney, a town in County Kerry which is in the southern portion of Ireland. Kerry is known for its beautiful mountains and views, and so far it has lived up to this idea. Today we spent the day biking around Killarney National Park. So I will start at the beginning:
We hopped on a 6PM bus last night in Galway headed to Limerick, though "hopped on" is a huge overstatement. We ahven't yet mastered the Irish bus system yet, and for this there are a few reasons:
1) The bus usually has the final destination lit up on the front of it, but sometimes the bus driver forgets to turn the sign on, or sometimes when you look at it it is written in Irish so you're not quite sure what it says.
2)There may be more than one bus going to your destination and the drivers of the buses may disagree about which one you should take. This happened to us last night and resulted in me almost leaving my bag on the wrong bus more than once.
3) If you're lucky the bus driver will shout the name of the town as you arrive in it. So far I have only been lucky about 16% of the time. Bascially it can be really dark and you may have no idea what town you are in and wonder if you missed your stop. This is an even bigger issue if you are not the most outgoing person in the world and would prefer not to speak up to the driver...
Moral of the story: We made it on time, and in one piece. We arrived at our hostel at shortly before 11PM and made our way up to our room. Two of our roommates were already asleep and the other one was not in the room at the time. The three of us (Sam, another girl named Yin and I) are in a 6 person en-suite room. Needless to say I survived my first night in a hostel, though things were touch and go when one of our roommates started shouting in his sleep. (Just kidding, it wasn't really touch and go...though he was shouting in his sleep).
This morning we woke up early and got some lovely scones and tea. We then made our way over to a local bike shoppe which has discounts for people staying at our hostel (euro 12.50 for a full day rental). We chatted with the old man in the shoppe (though admittedly could not understand him) and got a map and some guidelines from him.
Then we biked, and boy did we bike. As we speak the three of us are in very fragile states. If butts can bruise, then mine is certainly there. The ride was a reminder that I should take my dad up on his offers to go bike riding more often, because if I went I wouldn't be so out of shape. Rough estimates are that we rode somewhere between 15 and 20 miles over about 7 hours with some breaks for food and bike adjustments. We went to a castle, an old mansion, a waterfall and a bunch of spots with great views of the mountain range in the area. I will add pictures to this blog as soon as I get home.
We just went and had chinese food for dinner, which was good, and in about an hour we're headed out for some traditional irish music in some of the local pubs. Hopefully I'll update tomorrow with more about our killarney adventures.
In other news: it seems our internet is out again at our apartment. I just got an email from our program director with lots of complex info saying that the server has another virus. If you would like to attempt to decipher this language, please let me know and I'll be happy to forward it on to you :) .
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